Wilderness Character on Shenandoah's Old Rag Mountain: Opportunities for Solitude
Abstract
The Shenandoah Wilderness was designated by Congress in 1976, and includes areas that
receive extensive use from day hikers and backpackers alike. One such area within
the Shenandoah Wilderness is Old Rag mountain, a popular destination for hikers seeking
a challenging hike that offers scenic vistas and a rock scramble, and which can be
hiked in a day. The Wilderness Act of 1964 states that wilderness areas must be managed
to provide “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type
of recreation,” which presents a challenge to wilderness managers in Shenandoah National
Park who seek to avoid placing undue restrictions on the number of people having access
to the mountain.
The objective of this study was to answer three fundamental questions posed by the
Backcountry and Wilderness division at Shenandoah National Park, providing managers
with much-needed information about the existing conditions and trends in use along
the Old Rag loop trail. The questions addressed in the study are how many people are
currently using the Old Rag trail, what is the temporal distribution of that use,
and what experiences and opportunities for solitude are visitors having on the Old
Rag trail?
Through manual and automated collection of field data and the development of a Hiking
Simulation Model, this study estimates that between 71,600 and 86,500 visitors are
using the trail annually, that there is significant temporal variation in use patterns
at the hourly, daily, and monthly time scale, and that opportunities for solitude
vary greatly along with use patterns. While it is clear that opportunities for solitude
and associated visitor experiences are sometimes impaired, this has been the case
throughout the history of the park’s wilderness. It is recommended that managers provide
additional public education and information, continue to build upon the baseline data
collected in this study, and monitor trends in visitor use to ensure that opportunities
for solitude are not degrading over time.
Type
Master's projectPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/5238Citation
Kelly, Scott (2012). Wilderness Character on Shenandoah's Old Rag Mountain: Opportunities for Solitude.
Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/5238.Collections
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